Essay/Term paper: The influence of personal experiences in emily dickinson's poetry

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Emily Dickinson

The Influence of Personal Experiences In Emily Dickinson's Poetry


None of Emily Dickinson's readers has met the woman who lived and died
in Amherst, Massachusetts more than a century ago, yet most of those same
readers feel as if they know her closely. Her reclusive life made understanding
her quite difficult. However, taking a close look at her verses, one can learn a
great deal about this remarkable woman. The poetry of Emily Dickinson delves
deep into her mind, exposing her personal experiences and their influence on her
thoughts about religion, love, and death. By examining her life some, and
reading her poetry in a certain light, one can see an obvious autobiographical
connection.
All the beliefs and emotions Emily Dickinson wrote about were based, in
one way or another, on the same aspect of her upbringing, which was religion.
During her childhood, life in Amherst was based strongly upon religion and
Puritan values. The distinctive Puritan virtues of simplicity, austerity, hard
work, and denial of flesh, were ever-present disciplines in Emily's life (Sewall
22). Despite her stubborn denials to be labeled, she was very much of a "New
Englander". Cynthia Griffen Wolff, author of Emily Dickinson, points out that
Emily "knew every line of the Bible intimately, quoted from it extensively, and
referred to it many more times than she referred to any other work... yet in
this regard she was not unusual by Amherst's standards" (72). The most
prominent figure of religious virtues in her life was her father, Edward
Dickinson. Reading the Bible to his children and speaking in town of religious
ethics were daily events in his life. At home, he tried to raise his children
in the rigorous religion of their ancestors, however his methods appeared quite
harsh. People who knew the Dickinsons referred to Edward as a "severe, latter-
day Puritan, a power-minded tyrant...", and his home was often depicted as a "
gloomy prison" (Sewall 8). In fact, Emily's fear and awe of him seemed to
dominate her life. Although he read aloud from his Bible, conducted prayer
service in his home daily, and he educated his children in a strict Puritan way,
he himself was not quite a believer. He delayed conversion until well into
middle age, "...displayed no mark of singular devotion, defined his vocation in
terms of business, and was not inclined to explore the mysteries of the Divinity"
(Wolff 125) It is possible that the paradox of faith which tore Emily's mind
could have had its roots in her father's own doubts.
No quandary in life presented Emily Dickinson with such wrenching
choices as the demand for conversion. Her doubts tempted her to rebel against
God, but her needs drove her toward faith in Him. Neither stance could overcome
the other, and neither could be reconciled. Emotionally, she lacked a direction
of beliefs, however there was one thing she was sure of - God existed. "Reason
convinced her that there must be such a Being as God; and as to God's existence
she seems never to have wavered" (Wolff 84). Believing that He was there only
gave her something solid to forsake. In a letter to her friend once she wrote, "
...and I am standing alone in rebellion, and growing very careless..." (Sewall
375). However, it was only when she had achieved complete poetic independence
that she could confidently write in open defiance of God:
I reckon - when I count at all -

First - Poets - Then the Sun
Then Summer - Then the Heaven of God -
And then - the List is done -
But, looking back - the First so seems
To Comprehend the Whole -
The Others look a needless Show -
So I write - Poets - All -...
...And if the Further Heaven -
Be beautiful as they prepare
For Those who worship Them -
It is too difficult a Grace -
To justify the Dream - (Sewall 355)

On several occasions, Emily went as far as calling herself a pagan. The
bitterness with which the comment was made may have been aroused by the same
feeling as in the line "Of Course - I Prayed - / And did God Care?" of one of
her poems. Unable to accept Heaven, she was left only with this brief world,
which, without Heaven, seemed somewhat of a dreadful place to her. She wrote in
a letter once a prayer for forgiveness for trying to enjoy life too much. "Knew
I how to pray," she wrote, "to intercede for your Foot were intuitive, but I am
a Pagan" (Sewall 590), and then the poem:

Of God we ask one favor,
That we may be forgiven -
For what, he is presumed to know -
The Crime, from us, is hidden -
Immured the whole of Life
Within a magic Prison
We reprimand the Happiness
That too competes with Heaven

These religious doubts she harbored in her mind and so often expressed led her
to be seen as having renounced her faith and, most often, replaced it with a
belief in her own powers, especially those employed in her art. Charles
Anderson wrote that "...her pained sense of estrangement from the religion of
her fathers lingered to the end, but so did the integrity that gave her courage
to go her own way, to continue her search for Heaven through poetry rather than
through a theology she could not accept." (Bloom 35) Eventually she did find
Heaven, and she accepted it with open arms. She is said to have discovered
herself "elected to receive the grace of God". The relationship with God she
wrote of was much like a relationship of two people. For that reason, many of
her poems read as religious can also be seen as poems of love. An example of
one is this poem:

My River runs to thee -
Blue Sea! Wilt welcome me?
My River waits reply -
Oh Sea - look graciously -
I'll fetch thee Brooks
From spotted nooks -
Say - Sea - Take Me!

One could interpret this poem as her need to be accepted by God, as well as a
love poem expressing her yearning for human companionship. This yearning, along
with other forms of love poems, is shown a countless number of times in her
works.
Emily Dickinson's love poetry follows a similar pattern, one that is
both peculiar and frustrating. She brings together lovers, perfectly matched
and deeply in love. They are not unhappy, yet they are never allowed to be
together by some higher power. "The same poetry that postulates marriage as the
ideal also accepts as a given that this marriage can never take place" (Wolff
387) Emily could have written love poetry celebrating the strength of a happy
marriage or even examining the difficulties of achieving that perfect union, but,
for the most part, she did not. Separation was too much a part of her real-life
relationships for her not to acknowledge it. For various reasons, the major
friendships and passionate relationships of her life "...confirmed her deepest
conviction: where passion is concerned, there must be separation" (Wolff 411).
No poem captures this paradox more powerfully than this poem of loss:

I cannot live with You -
It would be Life -
And Life is over there -
Behind the Shelf...
...I could not die - with You -
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down -
You - could not -...
...Nor could I rise - with You -
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus's -
That New Grace

Her love is so strong that she compares him to Jesus, and he outshines Him, yet
she cannot live with him, die with him, or rise up to Heaven with him, due to
circumstances she can not help. The cause of separation, unlike her real
relationships, is almost always the same. "It is a trandescendent necessity;
God decrees that distance" (Wolff 412). In many of these poems, as the one
above, the speaker provokes Him into that action by claiming neither to need the
Divinity nor His heaven. The lover's make their own paradise. Not only does
this show influence of Emily's relationships, but once again it contains hints
of her religious struggle. Direct opposition of God is also set by the
generosity, affection, and willingness of the lovers to treat each other as
equals.
One characteristic of all the relationships that Emily created in her
poems is the idea of equality. Despite superficial differences of size, age, or
social power, the lover's are essentially equal, and neither wants to dominate
the relationship. This is shown in these excerpts from one of her poems:


He was weak...I was weak...
...I was strong...He was strong...
...So he let me lead him in...
...So I let him lead me - Home

Emily allows women to be treated fairly, in the same way as men. On many
occasions in her poems the voice of the "wife" speaks. For the most part, the "
wife" speaks of the hardships of the relationships. Humorous, it is a feeling
of impatience in the voice of the woman upon discovering that creating that
Heaven-on-Earth is more easily said than done (Wolff 350). The wife often seeks
to bring coherence to the troubles through the old-fashioned domestic qualities
taught to her in order to accommodate for the lost paradise.
The love poetry of Emily Dickinson is not "...idealizing and
incorporeal...", but rather it is "...ardent and filled with sexual
invitation..." (Wolff 385). One poem unlike her usual writings explores her
ability for passion and possibly a yearning for it:

Wild Nights - Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile - the Winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden -
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor - Tonight -
In Thee!

This gives so much evidence of Emily's capacity for passion that for a while
(now passed) "...critics generally supposed that the principle reason for her
art lay in some unfulfilled affair of the heart" (Wolff 385). However, her
passion in poems is never fulfilled due to the same theme of separation.
This separation she writes about not only deals with love, but often
with a more permanent separation, death. Death was only one more thing that
Emily knew of which kept people apart. The deaths of her friends and family
forced her to acknowledge the loneliness and separateness of this world. The
fact of death led her to question once again "...the nature of this Being Who
had authored our fate..." (Wolff 84). She found it hard to believe that she was
to worship and love something who could repeatedly take away from her all the
relationships that meant so much.
Emily Dickinson's preoccupation with death began when she was young and
continued on throughout most of her life. She was a meditative child, sensitive
and serious, and she began to puzzle over the mystery of death and new birth at
a very early age. Emily Dickinson was sure that after death life on Earth was
over, in all aspects. People lost all connections with previous lives, and
gained a morbid equality, such as that described in this poem:

...there was a little figure plump
For every little knoll -
Busy needles, and spools of thread -
And trudging feet from school -

Playmates, and holidays, and nuts -
And visions vast and small -
Strange that the feet so precious charged
Should reach so small a goal!

"The cemetery is filled with the dead and under "every little knoll' there lies
someone who was once a little child plying its tasks and pursuing its dreams;
yet all are now equally dead, equally far from life's pleasures" (Wolff 180).
The thing that frightened yet intrigued Emily the most about death was
the "...gradual isolation of an increasingly helpless self moving toward the
horror of the utterly unknown..." (Wolff 221). However, there was a certainty
of death. It was not a certainty of what would become of one, but that death
was sure to occur. When children die, many say they die "too soon" Dickinson is
apt to say that the death was not too soon, and that there is never a "right
time" to die. Wolff believes she would reprimand us for "...thinking ourselves
to clever and strong when we elude death for a while, and even forgetting his
long shadow falling across our paths..." and reminding us that "...in the end,
the Angel of Death dispatches us all" (181). In 1884, Emily Dickinson
experienced a "year of deaths" when five people close to her, including her
mother, her nephew, and two men she felt strongly for, passed on. In was during
this year that she wrote this poem which exemplified her own collapse that year:

So give me back to Death -
The Death I never feared
Except that it deprived of thee -
And now, by Life deprived,
In my own Grave I breathe
And estimate it's size -
It's size is all that Hell can guess -
And all that Heaven surmise -

This poem is about her confrontation with loss and death. Emily is "
...estimating the "size' of death - distancing it, coming to terms with it, and
finding no fear in it" (Sewall 665).
The personal experiences of Emily Dickinson had a great influence on her
poetry. Through her verses we can understand and relate to her much more easily.
Without them, her withdrawal from society would have kept her unknown. Once
she wrote:

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me -
The simple News that Nature told -
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see -
For love of Her - Sweet - countrymen -
Judge tenderly - of Me

It seems fairly obvious that Emily Dickinson knew that someday her poems would
be found and would be used as a window into her thoughts.